Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas by Sara E. Johnson (review)

Sarah Johnson’s book about “French negroes” after the Haitian Revolution is far less concerned with the “fear” they engendered among white slave owners than about the emergence of “competing inter-Americanisms” (p. 5) in the years between 1790 and 1830. Rather than catalogue negative reactions to the Haitian Revolution, she sketches a set of “transcolonial collaborations” among free and enslaved people of African descent, as well as whites. This book is not about nineteenth-century slave revolts but rather about the cultural repercussions of Haitian independence, including a “black transcolonial world … [that] resists reduction to a single framework.”(p. 7)

Johnson’s facility with a broad variety of cultural—as opposed narrowly political—materials in English, French and Spanish makes this book an important addition to the literature. Her chapter on responses to the Haitian Revolution in eastern Hispaniola showcases these abilities. She uses sources spanning three centuries to disentangle the attitudes of rural working people from the fierce anti-haitianismo of elite Dominican writers. She compares nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular images from both sides of Hispaniola, resurrects historical and fictional accounts of an early 1790s serial killer, analyzes the career of an enslaved Dominican who became a Haitian general, and reads folk lyrics as well as elite poetry. In other chapters, she examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century percussion instruments and rhythms and traces the shared editorial strategies of early nineteenth-century black newspapers published in New York, Paris, and Port-au-Prince.

Chapter 1 establishes the horror of Caribbean plantation slavery. Johnson shows how slave owners collaborated across colonial borders in the 1790s by importing “man-eating” dogs from Cuba into Saint-Domingue and Jamaica to fight black rebels. In Chapter 2 she delves deep into Dominican culture for proof that blacks in eastern Hispaniola were far more welcoming to Haitian Revolutionary armies than elite historiography would suggest. Chapter 3 examines the actions of Joseph Savary, a free man of color from Saint-Domingue who is mostly remembered for helping Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans. Savary’s little-known involvement in Gulf Coast slave smuggling, Johnson argues, illustrates the wide range of reactions to the Haitian Revolution by people of African descent. Chapter 4 argues that Saint-Domingue was a cultural hearth that gave rise to a variety of “French negro” performance styles among enslaved people throughout the Caribbean. And Chapter 5 shows the persistence of black “transcolonial collaborations” from the early 1800s into the 1830s. Johnson examines how the editors of black newspapers in New York, Paris, and Port-au-Prince worked to foster an inter-American black consciousness even though they ultimately advocated a kind of national assimilation for their readers.

Johnson’s book adds significantly to the literature on the impact of the Haitian Revolution because she captures the many ways in which people of African descent rebuilt their lives in slavery and in freedom. Rejecting easy dichotomies like resistance versus assimilation, her account explores the ideological “messiness” of the post-revolutionary period. Many of these ambiguities and shifts in identity will not be new to specialists. But Johnson’s work stands apart in its ability to depict popular attitudes about Haiti using sources preserved by Caribbean elites. Her concept of “transcolonial collaboration” works best in the chapters on white slave owners and free black newspaper editors, and functions more as a metaphor in the chapters that deal with enslaved people. And her sources do not clarify the question of whether revolutionary ideology spawned a new wave of slave revolts or substantially altered the nature of plantation resistance. But her book gives us a deeper understanding of how the Haitian Revolution spawned new forms of black culture and inter-American awareness in the greater Caribbean.